Elemental Season 1 - Day 9

May 15th, 2023

"So, where is the Bible in all of this? "

Great question. I have felt like in this series and in this discussion we sort of have to figure out why and how we ask the questions first before we jump into the scriptures. You see, it is too easy for a pastor/teacher to set up a scenario where we simply set up a question and then show you the solution. It is clean, it is nice, and we all go home feeling like there are no loose ends. But is that the way this journey works? Perhaps for some, it does. But I have found that when it comes to matters of faith, it is perhaps better to process a little. We want to make sure that we have the right questions, framed in a way that makes sense for our processing, and we also want to make sure that we understand what it means when we don’t get simple answers.

If we are just defenders of orthodoxy, then our lives of faith are actually not about faith, but they are about knowledge and protecting that knowledge. We go on security duty all the time making sure that we can fend off anyone who doesn’t think the way we do. We become apologetics for our understanding of theology and of God in a way that can lead to division, rather than to unity.

And there is a long history of this in Christianity, and really, in any faith tradition. In our own tradition, we were actually warned about this by one of our early church pioneers: J. N. Loughborough declared:

”The first step of apostasy is to get up a creed, telling us what we shall believe. The second is to make that creed a test of fellowship. The third is to try members by that creed. The fourth is to denounce as heretics those who do not believe that creed. And fifth, to commence persecution against such.”

Wow! That is pretty progressive thinking right there! And from someone born in 1832! But he was on to something. He must have understood that orthodoxy is not the only thing that binds us together. He must have understood that the life of faith is one of the questions as much as it is a life of answers. It is about trusting through discovery, hoping to understand, believing that there is more to discuss, more to share, and having an undying belief in the love that God has for us.